Friday, September 25, 2009

Leadership is a spirit that spawns in every soul that has faith in conquering the unknown frontiers. It is not necessary that a leader would always have a team to lead, to coordinate to achieve a set target. To me leadership is an instinct which compels one to go on the front step and hit confidently a swinging ball through the meat of the bat for a racing boundary. Instinct is the innate talent that causes a living being to respond reflexively to a given stimulus in a certain way. Many say leadership can't be taught nor can natural timing.

Its like falling in love. One can't plan or prepare to go for it. Its the collection of basic instincts that pushes her to take control of adverse situations...which makes her see an opportunity where there are none. Some dare to think beyond whats right & whats wrong, whats acceptable & whats unacceptable. It was only when man dared, he could fly high, he could walk... Only when we dare, we can think on new lines. Only then can one see solutions where others see problems. It is exactly when one switches his focus for direction to inside of herself instead of outside entity. Captain Jack Sparrow's compass can be looked upon as the guide when external landmarks aren't clear enough. Especially when we one finds oneself facing a fast-changing reality, the ability to maneuver the "internal frame of reference" to quickly match a new, changed reality or a new problem - tastes new success.To lead one should be able to submit also. Weaknesses may surface as fear, a lack of confidence, or even arrogance. One needs to accept them & then overcome them. Else these remain as hidden obstacles to thoughts & so to actions. Each one of us, has a continuous thought process, where we think about things happening around us, and we decide what is best for us to do to survive. If we try to introspect what we do, we find that usually we do have all the options that even the most successful people have. But what makes it different are the choices we make and the priorities we assign to them. To lead one needs to first be able to support the very thought process which identifies her in the very first place. One who is able to this is so-called a "Confident person". I would call such a person a leader also as she has been able to take control of herself and lead herself from the front.History is evident to the fact that its the worst of situations which give birth to the best of leaders, quite possibly because its when we really need one. It is quite rightly then, that one experiences a personal challenge. A person who is confident of what one thinks, can only focus on what crisis the society is facing as a whole. A leader starts to think beyond the needs of a typical human. This is the process by which we develop new ideas and learn that our existing notions are incorrect or inadequate. The Maslow's need theory possibly takes a shuffle for them. This I would say what spawns the creation of a leader. Our own thought process teaches us, to be bold in what we believe. It shows with time that it pays to stick to them, and its only then that we can someone else believe in those results. In one word, we call it determination. When we think, we give birth to a thought which is identified by two major things - the way we identify it & the extent to which we back it. As a human, we have the tendency to conform to things that bring a higher feeling of safety in us. So a thought projected by a confident person in an effective way gets our approval and so the thought grows as the number of people to support increases. Not surprising that we remember leaders by the very thoughts they stood by.Researchers have been puzzled a lot by the team of ants at work for they execute their operations with high efficiency and with high motivation. The question we face as to how can they achieve this without a leader? The way I make sense of it comes something like this... For a layman, we know there is a CPU in the computer which coordinates all the signals, processes & hardware in the computer. If we look into it a bit deeper, we come to know that each component has a processing unit of its own. Probably ants too have a little bit of leadership instinct in each one of them. When faced with a difficulty each one of them takes the initiative to solve it. Many of them come together to make possible things that very few species can be proud of on earth. So I would call it wrong to define a leader to a person who leads a team. Rather leadership is a spirit that lives in each of us. Some believe in it, rest wait for confirmation from others that they are right. One should always hold onto some quotient of responsibility for oneself and the situation one is in. Whether to ignore our “leadership instinct” - decides which side we are on.